Looking ot buy a metal lathe and mill

[Zero Signal]

I figure some of you guys might be into metal working with lathes and mills. What machines do you guys have experience with and what's your take on some of the less expensive (under 1k) machines? Grizzly and Harbor Freight have some that seem decent. I'm looking for something that will be ok for general work and I'd also like to get into gear making, so I also wanted to know if anyone knew of a fairly inexpensive gear hobbing machine or plans to make one. Any thoughts??

 

[blksn955.o]

I had a buddies dad who would buy used equipment from shops when they got new stuff/went out of business. He had an old old belt driven metal lathe, press, drill press, and a buddie of his got a mill.

Might even go take some night classes and get to know people who are in the field...I bet the schools themselvs get offers for stuff as well as shops looking to unload stuff.

I dont know if I would buy a a lathe or mill from a harbor frieght though.

 

[illwood]

blksn955.o has some decent advice. I've run mills and lathes from WWII vintage Bridgeport knee mills and South Bend lathes (with the wide leather belt drive) up to programming and running brand new Horizontal and Vertical Milling Centers and Turning Centers. (I currently am an applications engineer for a Haas distributor)

You might want to see if there are any auctions or maybe talk to a new machine dealer in your area because sometimes part of the deal for a new machine is to remove the old ones.

What kind of work are you planning on doing on this/these machine(s)? You can even put together your own small scale CNC setup together with an existing manual milling machine and some creativity. Go learn about LinuxCNC.

I know you mentioned gear hobbing, but that's a bit unrealistic for these types of machines. If you go with the CNC setup, you can cut straight cut gears on the milling machine, but that is going to be time consuming and the gears will be noisey to run (like the reverse gear in a 5-speed). Helical gears (like 1st through 5th) are much quieter, but require a synchronous motion between the gear hob feeding into the gear and the gear turning a few degrees depending on the angle of the helix.

Sorry, but when you ask questions like this of a Mechanical Engineer with a metal cutting background, you tend to get the long answers. Post up any more questions and if I can help you, I will.

 

[reddy351]

I would avoid the Harbor Freight mills and stuff. I have a friend that bought a horizontal bandsaw. It is a really poorly built piece of junk. The mills that I looked at had a lot of "play" and excessive "tolerance"....JUNK!

Your best bet is what has already been said. A 1940's/50's era Bridgeport will get you MUCH better results. Even if you have to soak it in oil and do some clean-up work on it, you'll be much happier with it.

I know a guy that, every piece of equipment in his shop was "salvaged" from shops that were closing or swapping to newer equipment. Obviously, he's a believer. It's his "bread and butter" to boot.

 

[Zero Signal]

I'll start talking to people about getting some old used stuff. The problem is that the old stuff I've found tend to be completely rusty beyond the point of me wanting to finish it AND costs over what I can dream of paying.

Right now it's just for the sake of being a hobby and making parts here and there. I thought of the CNC conversions, I was looking into the CNC Fusion kits and it would probably come in down the road.